photo of Laughing Squid & Frank Chu by Scott Beale
I thought should probably do a write-up on what Laughing Squid is all about, beyond what is in our FAQ and what has been written about us in the media.
When I meet people and tell them that I run Laughing Squid, many of them say they’ve heard of it, but don’t really know what it is that we actually do. Here’s the short version:
Laughing Squid is an online resource for art, culture & technology and independent web hosting company. It is run by primary tentacle Scott Beale, who is also the publisher editor of the blog and is joined by the occasional guest blogger.
So, I’ll try expanding on that a bit more on this blog post, but first, a little history:
Laughing Squid was founded on November 16th, 1995 in San Francisco by Scott Beale as a film and video production company, producing documentaries on the surrealist painter Alonso Smith and The Cacophony Society’s Portland Santacon ‘96 event. In 1996 Laughing Squid launched The Squid List and for a while Laughing Squid offered publicity and web design services, but then started focusing on web hosting in 1998. In December 1999 John Law joined as a partner in Laughing Squid as head of “special projects”, followed by David Klass, joining as a silent partner.
Ok, on to what we actually do. Here a few things that make up Laughing Squid:
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ART, CULTURE & TECHNOLOGY – As our tagline suggests, one of the main objectives of Laughing Squid is promoting art, culture and technology. A secondary goal of ours is to help connect the art community with the tech community, by letting artists know what tools and resources are available to promote their work and in turn get the geeks out from behind their computer and experience more art.
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WEB HOSTING – Since 1998 we have been providing dependable web hosting services to individuals, artists and bloggers. This is our primary source of revenue. The “business” side of Laughing Squid. If Laughing Squid were a mullet, web hosting would be the short part in the front. The revenue generated from the web hosting side of Laughing Squid helps to fund the art, culture & technology of Laughing Squid. Our web hosting operations are located over at laughingsquid.us.
Web Host Industry Review did an interview with Scott Beale about Laughing Squid Web Hosting in their March 2009 issue.
- BLOG – In January 2005 we launched the Laughing Squid blog, essentially converting most of Laughing Squid to WordPress. There we post about a variety of things mostly relating to art, culture and technology.
- PHOTOGRAPHY – I shoot a lot of photos and have been since high school. For the last decade my primary focus has been documenting San Francisco’s incredibly diverse art scene and in the last couple of years I’ve expanded it to the current explosion in web technology and related events. Here’s over 25,000 photos from 2005-2009. Some day I’ll get around to scanning and uploading all of the pre-2000 stuff.
- PROPAGANDA – We’ve been pretty good at promoting ourselves through the years. Our infamous logo, created by the super talented Matt Dong, has been making the rounds since around 2000 and shows up on our t-shirts, stickers and buttons. We also commissioned a series of 10 post cards from some of our favorite artists.
- SQUID – Well as you might guess, we love squid. In fact, we’re so into squid that we have an entire link blog devoted to just squid: squid.us
- EVENTS – Speaking of events, Laughing Squid has organized many events over the years. For our 5th anniversary in 2000 we sold out the Great American Music Hall. In 2003 we went to New York and had our big “Laughing Squid: NYC” show at the now defunct CB’s 313 Gallery. From 1999 to 2003, we produced The Tentacle Sessions, a monthly artist salon. Here’s a list of the events that we have organized over the years.
- THE SQUID LIST – Since 1996 we have been running The Squid List, a curated list of art, culture and technology events taking place in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is both an online calendar, as well as an email list.
- REGIONAL EVENTS LISTS – We also add interesting regional events we come across to our link blog.
- COMMUNITY – A big part of what Laughing Squid does is connecting people and organizations with other people, organizations and resources in the community. This often includes helping to organize, document (photos or video) or even sponsor an event. A few of the events and organizations we have been involved with over the years include Burning Man, ArtCar Fest, Defenestration, Survival Research Labs, The Cacophony Society, SEEMEN, the extended universe of Chicken John, Power Tool Drag Races, Black Rock Arts Foundation, RoboGames, Santarchy (Santacon), Webzine, the original BarCamp, Maker Faire, dorkbot-sf, How to Destroy the Universe and Hi Fructose Magazine, just to name a few.
Yeah, so as you can see, it’s not that easy to give an “elevator pitch” about what we do. For the most part, we like the fact that what we are all about is somewhat ambiguous.
Oh right, I bet you were hoping that I would tell you why were are called “Laughing Squid”. Well that will have to wait for a future blog post.
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